Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels. Toby Ferris

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СКАЧАТЬ it is a battle of the sexes, a reactionary taming of the (untameable) shrew, a world-turned-upside-down where women wield manic power, an uproarious crisis of authority. Or perhaps we should look at Bruegel’s drawings for the engravings of the seven deadly sins – there are parallels between Griet and the figure of Iracunda, or Wrath.

      On the train on the way over I read an exhaustive and interesting essay by Margaret Sullivan in which she traces the iconography of the stock figures of Madness and Folly and links them to Meg and the giant respectively, but I find I can’t remember much about it as I stand here. I content myself instead with trying to work out the architectural division of the space, the logic of the towers and the curtain walls, and enjoying the ruddy sky.

      ‘Some pages [of Alexander Wied’s very good book on Bruegel] read like a parody of the frenzied activity of modern scholars – most strikingly the bewildering pages on Dulle Griet, who nonetheless remains triumphantly unexplained.’

      Review by Helen Langdon of Alexander Wied’s Bruegel in the Burlington Magazine, January 1982

      Do you formulate or access a reading or readings as you stand in front of a painting? Readings are always present – the art historian Michael Baxandall says that we do not discuss paintings but descriptions of paintings – but readings, or descriptions, are distinct from the process of observation. A reading, or a description, is grounded on a logical sorting, a winnowing of detail; observation is messier, more repetitive, obsessive, returning again and again to the same objects. Whatever readings or descriptions you arrive with, you can be sure the painting will cock a snook at them.

      I suppose a professional might notice the way his or her attention drifts around the panel, recording shifts of attention as flickers of data. I am not a professional. I make, nonetheless, the following notes in my notebook: the experience of standing in front of Dulle Griet, I record, is one of dissipation. My attention fragments over the detail. I look closely, not broadly. It is an experience of noticing, in between bouts of inattention and mind-wandering: of looking with the eyes alone. It is not an experience of understanding. The things you thought you would see are not the things you see. Who knows what you now think? Who cares, really?

      I do notice one thing above everything else. The sky is ruddier than I thought. I have never seen a sky remotely as ruddy as this in any reproduction. That sky really is burning. I stare at it. It is a colour field. You have a little psychological wobble if you stand in front of it long enough. Had Bruegel met Rothko or Van Gogh, they would have agreed on this at least: saturated colour impinges on you.

      How? Emotionally? Viscerally? Not viscerally – whatever is happening is definitely happening in my head, somewhere behind my eyes. I feel, on this occasion, no emotion. Is it evocative? It does not evoke memory, or association. It is just an overriding perceptual stimulus. We have a less fully-worked-out network of descriptors for percepts than we do, say, for emotions, hence our difficulty discussing aesthetics. Percepts are just more or less noteworthy.

      Yes, there it is: to stand in front of Dulle Griet is to experience a noteworthy percept, of ruddiness.

      Perhaps painters in the sixteenth century – who had been apprenticed to other painters from a young age, grinding and mixing paints, staring at bowls and pastes and palettes of saturated colour morning to night, lost dreamy adolescents there in the workshop reeking of glues and sizes, while outside the world was passing through a duller, less superficial age, an age of few images and no industrial dyes – perhaps sixteenth-century painters, in short, were more sensitive to the allure of pure pigment.

      The ruddy sky is all the ruddier for the silhouetted city, the rigging and towers and cavorting creatures picked out in front of it. The charred blackness brings out the red.

      In particular there is a tower with a rigged flagpole: frogs, or frog-like entities, are climbing the rigging; a monkey watches from the tower. And one of the frogs is dancing a victory jig as the horizon burns. He is waving a spear. Elsewhere, more frog entities are dancing a round-dance on a tiered structure.

      A burning city was not the most unusual sight in the sixteenth century: it was something to which the imagination, if not the eye, would have been accustomed.

      In 1534, Bruegel’s putative hometown of Breda burned to the ground. Of 3,000 buildings, only 150 remained.

      Such was the periodic fate of medieval cities, wooden towns. Like the forests renewed by wildfire, so too cities were regularly reduced by fire escaped from hearth or furnace or set (in the popular imagination) by conspiratorial arsonists communicating by means of secret signs placed on buildings. Come running with a bucket if you must, but this is how cities clear their undergrowth.

      This ruddiness was the colour to fear in the sixteenth century.

      ‘The burning of forest began settlement,’ says Stephen J. Pyne in his history of European fire regimes, Vestal Fire: ‘the burning of cities ended it.’

      On 14th May 1940, following a breakdown of communication (signal flares lost in the smoke of battle while the Dutch negotiated surrender), the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam. Some planes turned back, but a remnant fleet of fifty-seven low-flying Heinkel He 111s dropped 1,150 110lb and 158 550lb bombs on the Dutch forces holding the north bank of the Nieuwe Maas River. The wooden city burned for two days, the fires fuelled not only by the buildings but by tanks of vegetable oil located near the old port. An estimated 850 people died, and 85,000 were rendered homeless; 24,978 homes, 24 churches, 2,320 stores, 775 warehouses and 62 schools were destroyed.

      On the day following the raid, British Bomber Command was instructed to alter its directives on so-called strategic bombing, and begin targeting cities of the Ruhr, including their civilian populations. The era of firestorms – Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo – had begun.

      Rotterdam would be bombed again, multiple times, over the next four years, by Allied forces. The city was no longer as combustible as it had been on 14th May 1940, but other forms of destruction were available.

      *

      ‘When the invasion of Holland took place, I was recalled from leave and went on my first operation on 15th May 1940 against mainland Germany. Our target was Dortmund and on the way back we were routed via Rotterdam. The German Air Force had bombed Rotterdam the day before and it was still in flames. I realized then only too well that the phoney war was over and that this was for real. By that time the fire services had extinguished a number of fires, but they were still dotted around the whole city. This was the first time I’d ever seen devastation by fires on this scale. We went right over the southern outskirts of Rotterdam at about 6,000 or 7,000 feet, and you could actually smell the smoke from the fires burning on the ground. I was shocked seeing a city in flames like that. Devastation on a scale I had never experienced.’

      Air Commodore Wilf Burnett, DSO

      *

      To make a painting is to hope that it will last. But none lasts for ever. Any singular object is a hostage to looting, theft, earthquake, fire, flood, bombing, and other local versions of the apocalypse. The post-war map of Europe, as of much of the globe, was excoriated, flattened, pounded to ashes; millions died and much was destroyed.

      The Bruegel Object, so far as we know, was untouched. The paintings were smuggled underground, into mines and tunnels; when they re-emerged, they were unwrapped and dusted down and rehung, icons of resurrection. The yawning gaps in civilization crusted over, and on we went.

      But it is only a matter of time and accident. When will the last Bruegel painting disappear? They are fragile. Which one will it be? And what about records of his paintings, his existence? СКАЧАТЬ